Picture a football team that finished 8-4. A program that competed every week, developed its players, won more than it lost, and by every measure of what a successful college football season looks like, delivered one.
The reward for this accomplishment is a bowl game in mid-December, in a 40,000-seat stadium with 11,000 people scattered across it, against a program they have no connection to, in a city nobody traveled to, with several key players sitting out to protect their portal stock. The broadcast draws modest ratings. The stadium feels like a practice facility. The final score will be forgotten by New Year's.
This is not a failure. This is what success looks like for most Group of Six football programs in 2026. And that is the problem.
For mid-major and Group of Six athletics—football and basketball in particular—the current structure is not a difficult climb. It is a rigged game. The programs competing within it have largely accepted the terms even though those terms were designed to keep them begging for scraps. Until the people running these programs have the clarity and the courage to say that out loud, the treadmill keeps turning.
This article is about what happens when you step off.
Part One: The Game Is Rigged and Everyone Knows It
Start with the financial reality of G6 football, because the numbers make the argument without any editorializing required.
Under the current CFP deal with ESPN, the Group of Six conferences collectively receive 9 percent of the annual $1.3 billion contract. The average G6 program receives approximately $1.8 million per year in CFP revenue. The SEC and Big Ten each receive 29 percent—a sum that translates to roughly $21 million per school annually, from television rights alone, before a single ticket is sold or a corporate partnership is signed.
That gap does not represent different levels of investment or ambition. It represents a revenue-sharing structure that was designed by and for the programs at the top, and adjusted at the margins to maintain the political fiction of open competition.
The on-field results validate what the financial structure implies. JMU and Tulane both appeared in the 2025 College Football Playoff—and both were clearly outmatched in their first-round matchups. The conversation that followed was not about how to create more opportunity for G6 programs. It was about whether they deserved the opportunity they had been given. Power conference administrators and media voices questioned openly whether G6 programs should retain automatic playoff access at all. The G6's reward for showing up was a serious debate about whether it should be allowed to keep showing up.
Meanwhile, the bowl system has become a structural anachronism. There was a time when a bowl invitation meant something—a destination, a genuine competitive milestone, a celebration of a season well played. Most G6 programs in 2026 experience something different: a mid-December trip to a stadium that is functionally empty, against an opponent selected by mutual conference agreement rather than competitive merit, in a matchup that generates almost no national interest and serves primarily as a checkbox that ADs and Coaches can use as a proxy for success.
Players opt out. Fans weigh the cost of the trip against the reward of attending and frequently decide to stay home. The milestone has become a formality that placates G6 programs for their willful subservience to the status quo.
The Basketball Reality
Basketball is the same argument told in different numbers. The last two NCAA Tournaments have produced zero mid-major Sweet 16 appearances. The most recent two fields went a combined 0-9 in second-round games. Over the 18 prior tournaments, mid-major programs averaged 7.6 first-round wins and 2.4 appearances in the second weekend. This is not a rough stretch caused by bad luck or poor coaching. This is the documented result of a resource gap that the House settlement has made dramatically, perhaps permanently, worse.
The transfer portal retention numbers tell the story bluntly. In the most recent cycle, G6 programs retained 25 percent of their first-team all-conference players. Power Four programs retained over 80 percent of theirs.
Contending Power Four basketball rosters are now budgeted at $10 to $20 million. Most G6 basketball programs are working with $1 to $3 million. Power Four football schools allocate 75 to 80 percent of their total revenue sharing to football, leaving roughly 15 cents of every dollar for basketball.
For G6 programs with FBS football, this is a trap. They are forced to choose between funding a football program that generates almost nothing in national competitive relevance but draws excitement on campus, or adequately funding basketball which presents a clearer path to building their institutional brand. They are left with a choice: Do we pursue conference championships on the gridiron, or do we try to keep up with non-football playing peers that build elite mid-major basketball programs?
The question worth asking publicly, which almost nobody running these programs will ask: if the structure is designed to exclude you from meaningful competition before the season begins, why are you organizing your entire athletic identity around trying to win it?
Part Two: What If You Built Your Own Game?
A G6 Football Playoff
There is a model that proves this works, and the college sports establishment has spent years declining to learn from it because acknowledging it requires acknowledging something uncomfortable.
North Dakota State has won more football national championships in the last fifteen years than most Power programs have touched. The FCS runs a 24-team playoff that produces drama, dynasties, and fan bases that feel real investment because something real is at stake. It is not the College Football Playoff. It is also not a product that anyone who is a part of it would describe as meaningless. The FCS playoff works because it created a genuine championship structure for a defined tier of competition, made the rules transparent, and let programs compete within them on equal terms. The model is not a consolation prize. It is a functioning championship ecosystem.
A G6 playoff does not require permission from the SEC and Big Ten. It requires G6 conferences to decide—together, with genuine commitment—that they are done organizing their football seasons around the thin hope of a CFP at-large bid that almost never materializes and a bowl system that has lost most of its meaning.
A 12 to 16-team G6 playoff, seeded by competitive merit, featuring conference champions plus at-large selections from the most competitive programs in the group, creates something the current structure cannot offer: a real championship with real stakes for the programs and fan bases that are currently playing out the string from late October onward.
It also creates something with television value. A G6 postseason with a coherent identity, featuring fan bases that are deeply invested because something meaningful is on the line, is a product sponsors and networks can sell. The audience for authentic mid-major competition is larger than the current structure gives it credit for being—in part because the current structure never gives it a stage worth watching.
The honest obstacle here is not logistical. It is psychological. Athletic directors and conference commissioners who have spent careers measuring their programs against Power benchmarks will resist any decision that looks like an acknowledgment of a separate tier. That resistance is understandable. It is also the thing currently keeping G6 football programs on a treadmill that goes precisely nowhere.
The bowl trips will keep happening. The empty stadiums will keep being filmed. The argument that the current structure is working for G6 football will keep being made by the people whose jobs depend on believing it and the fans who like pretending that they are competing at the same level as Alabama.
Redefining success is not a retreat. It is the only strategy available that does not guarantee continued irrelevance.
A Mid-Major Basketball Championship
What follows is an idea worth serious examination. It is not a recommendation. The downsides are real, and ODU Unfiltered is not willing to pretend otherwise.
The NIT, in its current form, is a product without a coherent identity. It exists primarily as a fallback for Power conference programs that believe they deserved an NCAA bid and didn't get one, and as a consolation for mid-major programs that didn't win their conference tournament. Nobody watches it with true investment. Nobody wins it with genuine pride. The brand has carried consolation-prize baggage for so long that rehabilitation within the current structure is probably impossible.
The concept: beginning the weekend after the NCAA Tournament's first round concludes, a new tournament—new name, new identity, not the NIT—opens exclusively to mid-major programs.
The field of 32 includes automatic bids to the highest-finishing mid-major programs that did not receive NCAA at-large consideration. Critically, it also extends at-large invitations to mid-major conference tournament champions that received automatic NCAA bids but lost in the first round. A team that won its conference, earned its place in the bracket, and lost by six to a two-seed has not been forced to end its season in disappointment. That program has built something worth celebrating, and its fan base would watch four more games.
Higher seeds host through regional rounds. A Final Four and championship rotate annually through top mid-major venues. The selection criteria are transparent and merit-based. The name communicates exactly what the tournament is—a championship for a distinct and legitimate tier of college basketball—without apology and without the connotation of failure. The Mid-Major Championship. The Challenger Classic. Something that says plainly: this is who we are, and we are proud of it.
The timing alone has real value. The NCAA first round ends on a Sunday. A mid-major championship that tips off the following week sustains basketball viewership through a period when interest normally falls off sharply. The narrative writes itself: programs and fan bases still competing, still invested, playing for something that matters in their communities even after the big bracket has moved on without them.
All of that is the case for. The case against deserves equal weight.
Participation in a separate championship is, at some level, acceptance of a two-tier structure. A program that builds its identity around winning the Mid-Major Championship has made a choice, whether consciously or not, to stop competing for the same prize as Kentucky and Duke. That is a form of relegation. Dressing it up in better branding does not change what it is, and any honest presentation of this idea has to say so.
More importantly, this may be the wrong moment to accept that separation. The transfer portal dynamics currently decimating mid-major rosters are not settled policy. The College Sports Commission's clearinghouse enforcement is still evolving. The contract and buyout structures discussed in the final section of this piece, if implemented, could meaningfully slow the talent drain that is currently producing those 0-9 second-round records. The competitive gap between mid-majors and Power programs is at its widest right now, but there is a real argument that structural reform could narrow it before it becomes permanent.
Accepting structural relegation before reform has run its course would mean giving up on a fight that may not yet be lost. That is worth sitting with before anyone decides the Mid-Major Championship is the answer.
So while this is an idea that deserves conversation, it does not deserve premature consensus.
Part Three: Put the Student Back
Everything in the first two sections addresses symptoms. The disease is something else entirely.
College athletics abandoned the educational compact at the center of its identity and replaced it with a professional sports model that has all of the costs of professional sports and none of the structural order that makes professional sports manageable. What resulted is a system with $40 million rosters, annual free agency, constant roster turnover, and an ever-widening gap between the handful of programs that can sustain this model and the hundreds that cannot. The House settlement did not create this problem. It made visible a problem that had been developing for years and gave it a price tag that can no longer be ignored.
The strongest argument any university has ever had on behalf of its athletic program is also the one being most aggressively undermined by the current financial structure. Student-athletes are being compensated with something of genuine and substantial value. A four-year education worth tens of thousands of dollars. Coaching that would cost an individual athlete more than any salary they will ever earn to access privately. Athletic training, nutritional support, sports medicine, and facilities infrastructure that no professional minor league system provides. And increasingly, real commercial opportunity to build a personal brand with institutional support while still enrolled as a student.
That is not a trivial package. At programs where it is delivered seriously, it is genuinely transformative.
That argument only holds, however, if the education is real. If the institution is actually holding athletes to the same academic standards it holds every other student. If genuine progress toward a degree is happening. If the educational mission the university was built to fulfill is being delivered rather than performed for compliance purposes.
When athletes cycle through programs on one-year arrangements, transfer annually, and are never in one place long enough to develop genuine academic continuity, the university's foundational argument collapses. You cannot claim that the scholarship is meaningful compensation while operating a system in which the scholarship is functionally incidental to the transaction. The two positions are incompatible, and the current structure has resolved the tension by quietly abandoning the educational side of the equation.
The principle this section is advancing is not that athletes should not be paid. They should be. The principle is that the current unregulated market—rosters priced at $30 to $40 million, player movement treated as pure free agency, academic requirements that exist on paper and bend in practice—is unsustainable for everyone except the ten or fifteen wealthiest programs in the country.
It is not good for the players, who are entering financial arrangements that evaporate when eligibility ends and who are moving so frequently that the educational experience the scholarship is supposed to provide becomes impossible. And it is destroying the thing that makes college athletics genuinely distinctive and genuinely valuable: the emotional connection between a player, a program, a campus, and a community. That connection is what fans are actually watching for. It is disappearing, and neither the players nor the programs are better off for its absence.
A Contract Structure That Protects the Programs That Develop Players
The most actionable structural reform available—one that does not require the NCAA to act but does require conferences and institutions to advocate for it—is a multi-year contract framework with enforceable buyout provisions.
Here is what it looks like at a high level. A player signs a two- or three-year agreement with a program that includes their full compensation package—revenue sharing, scholarship, and NIL access—alongside defined academic progress requirements that are tied to the agreement's terms. The contract is binding for its stated term. A player retains the right to enter the portal, but transferring before the contract expires triggers a buyout obligation on the receiving program.
The buyout is calculated as a percentage of the player's new compensation, scaled to the years remaining on the original agreement. The principle is that the program which recruited, developed, coached, and educated a player has a financial stake in that player's market value. When a larger program decides it wants to acquire that value, it pays for what it is acquiring.
Transfer Buyout Calculator
Adjust the parameters below to see exactly how this model would financially protect mid-major programs when their developed talent is poached by Power 4 schools.
Enforcement runs through the CSC clearinghouse that already exists for NIL compliance. Any transfer involving a player under contract that does not include documentation of satisfied buyout obligations is flagged as a compliance violation. The receiving program faces scholarship sanctions. The incentive structure is the same as any functioning contract system: the cost of non-compliance must exceed the cost of compliance.
This changes two things simultaneously. It creates real financial protection for mid-major programs that invest in player development—turning what is currently a free farm system for Power programs into a marketplace with actual transaction costs for the programs doing the raiding. And it creates genuine incentive for mid-major programs to invest more in the players they already have, because the return on that investment can now be captured rather than simply surrendered when a richer program comes calling.
It also creates something that has largely vanished from college athletics and whose absence is felt acutely by everyone who watches it: continuity. Players who are in the same program for more than a single season. Coaches who develop real relationships with their players over multiple years. Fan bases who know the names on the back of the jerseys and have watched those players grow.
The product that college sports fans consistently say they miss—the product that generated the emotional attachment that fills arenas and drives donations and builds the kind of institutional loyalty that sustains programs for generations—is inseparable from that continuity. The current structure eliminates it. A contract framework with meaningful buyouts begins to restore it.
The Case for a Different Kind of Winning
The Power Two will keep moving toward a fully professional model. The resource gap will keep widening. Mid-major programs cannot change that trajectory, and spending energy trying to is energy that could be directed somewhere more productive.
What can change is whether mid-major programs continue measuring themselves against that trajectory—or whether they find the clarity to build something genuinely different. Not a lesser version of what Kansas and Alabama have. Something with a different definition of excellence entirely, grounded in the things mid-major programs actually have going for them: genuine community identity, local market dominance, the kind of intimate connection between a program and its people that has always been the foundation of college athletics.
Dayton generates 70 percent of its athletic budget from basketball. Not from football revenue, not from Power conference television deals, but from a program so thoroughly embedded in the identity of a mid-sized Ohio city that it has been in the top 35 nationally in attendance for fifty consecutive years. VCU turned a commuter school in Richmond into a nationally recognized brand on the back of a basketball program that played in the Final Four and made the city believe in something. These are not accidents. They are the result of programs that understood what they actually had and built around it instead of chasing something they could never become.
Sixty-two percent of fans now discover new teams through short-form digital content. The media landscape rewards authenticity and access over production budgets. Mid-major programs in mid-sized cities—where they can be the dominant sports identity in their market rather than one of many competing for attention—have a community engagement opportunity that they must tap into. The audience for genuine, locally rooted, educationally connected college athletics is larger than the current structure gives it credit for, in part because the current structure never gives it a compelling reason to show up.
A G6 football playoff with real stakes. A basketball postseason that celebrates mid-major excellence on its own terms without apology. Contract structures that protect the programs developing players and restore the continuity that makes college sports worth watching. Academic standards that honor the educational mission these universities were built to fulfill, and that give mid-major programs their most powerful and most honest marketing argument: we are developing whole people, not just athletes, and the value of what we provide is real.
The question is whether the people running these programs are willing to stop playing the one they were never going to win.